The introduction of this book is devoted to
contemporary discussions about language
diversity in the context of globalization, a
debate in which the legacy of the German
scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) is
regularly mentioned. Even though Humboldt
played an important role in the history of
linguistics and of the philosophy of language,
there is no satisfying introduction to his
thought in English. The aim of the book is to
provide such an introduction, especially in the
perspective of modern debates about
anthropological linguistics and the link
between language and culture.

Part 1, “Language and world”, is both a
historical presentation of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis and a critical discussion of the
positions defended by various protagonists of
the debates on language diversity. In Chapter 1
(“The Word is a World”), Underhill criticizes
what he considers to be the flawed
argumentation of European proponents of
language diversity. Most of them, especially
the French Africanist Anne Stamm, defend the
view that a language is not only the gate to
the culture of its speakers, but that culture
is somehow identical with language (p. 7, see
also Stamm 1999:140). Underhill quickly shows
why this “metaphysical” stance is not
satisfying and then (Ch. 2: “What Do We Have in
Mind When We Talk about Language?”) comes to
more general views on the relationship between
thought and language. People defending some
sort of correlation or determinism, he says,
often use the term “worldview” but hardly
define it, just as they give few precise
definitions about what they call “thought” or
“language”. Following this (Ch. 3), Underhill
raises the question “What Do We See in the Term
Worldview?”. That term is a translation from
German, where it has two forms: “Weltansicht”
and “Weltanschauung”. Both are often confused,
but their meaning is different. “Weltansicht”
refers to the way our culture or in this case
our language system supposedly shapes our
perception of the world. “Weltanschauung” is
much more akin to “ideology” or “philosophy”.
The “Worldview hypothesis” (in the sense of
“Weltansicht”) claims that language plays a
role in everyday perception and
conceptualization, but that does not mean that
it is a sort of mental prison outside which we
cannot think.

Underhill next draws the outline of a
“philological archaeology” of the “Worldview
hypothesis” in the 20th century. The first
character discussed (Ch. 4) is Franz Boas, who
worked on American Indian languages with the
idea that no culture, no language is superior
to any other, and defended a relatively weak
form of relativism as opposed to the
rationalist background of comparative grammar
in the 19th century. Boas did not believe in
linguistic determinism, but he worked on the
irreducible grammatical differences between
languages. Yet, he sometimes seemed to suggest
that the categorial templates of languages, as
exemplified by the parts of speech or by
derivational morphology, correspond to
instinctive conceptual schemes shared by
speakers of that language. This idea was
adopted by Sapir, to whom Chapter 5 is devoted.
According to Sapir, language provides the tools
with which we categorize the outside world. In
this sense, there is an influence of language
on thought. Yet, Sapir defended a strict
usage-based account: the “tyranny of language”
is not a tyranny of the grammatical system but
a tyranny of social norms. In other words,
there is no direct linguistic determination of
thought or culture. Finally, Whorf (Ch. 6)
radicalised Sapir’s conception of language as a
set of patterns through his notion of “habitual
thought”: For Whorf, meaning is a set of
context- and language-bound clusters. Those
clusters are “schemes” in which “subjective
experience is systematically objectified” (p.
36). Unlike many scholars, Underhill defends
the view that Whorf was not, strictly speaking,
a relativist, but established hierarchies
between languages according to their degree of
correspondence with immediate experience - for
instance, the Hopi system was allegedly more
akin to universal human frames of thought than
“Standard Average European”.

Part 2, “Humboldt, Man and Language”, is
centred on Humboldt, who is sometimes
considered to have introduced the concept or
worldview as “Weltanschauung”, to which Whorf
and others later resorted. Yet, as Underhill
shows in Chapter 7 (“Worldview - Weltanschauung
or Weltansicht”), Humboldt himself hardly used
the word “Weltanschauung”, but spoke of
Weltansicht, glossed by Underhill as “the
capacity which language bestows upon us to form
the concepts with which we think and which we
need in order to communicate.” In Chapter 8,
“Sprache”, Underhill shows that for Humboldt,
as for late 18th-century philosophers such as
Herder or Hamann, language is the “organ of
thought”. Humboldt’s original contribution lies
in his idea that language is an activity rather
than an object of any kind. Language exists
only at the level of performance. This dynamic
conception is at the core of Chapter 9, “The
Work of the Mind”, which exposes the idea that
“meaning arises in discourse from mental work”
(p. 63). This dynamic view of things is related
to the more general question of “Bildung”, i.e.
the education or formation of Humankind. This
brings Underhill to the question of the
heritage of Enlightenment. More specifically,
Humboldt appears to have been strongly
influenced by Kant’s theories about the role of
individual understanding in perception and
conceptualization. Yet for Humboldt, the
categories shaping our experience are not
really a priori as postulated by Kant, but
rather language-bound. Nevertheless, thanks to
linguistic creativity and innovation, we can
free ourselves from those conceptual schemes.
We are influenced by our language, but we are
not prisoners of it.

Chapter 10, “Form”, deals with the requisites
of comparative linguistics in a Humboldtian
fashion. First, the dynamicity and fluidity of
language cannot be overestimated. Second, the
faculty of language cannot be studied without
appropriate knowledge of individual languages.
Third, even though one can never fully command
a foreign language, the global comprehension of
a linguistic system can be achieved by the
philologist who has a critical mass of details
about that language. The overall idea of
Chapter 11 (“Creativity, Culture and
Character”) is that individual speakers,
especially writers, have the capacity of
pushing a language forward. The patterns
provided by a language are not prisons. As
Underhill puts it: “Individual creativity
refines and enriches the language we speak: and
that refined and enriched language exerts a
creative influence upon our minds” (p. 89). The
next question is that of “catching the
character” of a given language (Ch. 12). After
criticizing “much comparative linguistics of
the second half of the twentieth century” as
relying upon “absurd and, quite literally,
meaningless” premises, (p. 97-98), Underhill
underlines the limits of Humboldt’s system,
which relies too heavily on the metaphor of
“language as an individual”, and could lead one
to mistake the works of great writers for the
character of their language. Finally, there is
also a risk of self-projection from the mother
tongue of the analyst onto the language (s)he
studies. In Chapter 13 (“A seeing and feeling
Worldview”), Underhill claims that the notion
of Worldview must be adapted in order to
distinguish between “world-perceiving” and
“world-conceiving”. This leads him to enumerate
the “Four dangers of the comparative approach”
(ch. 14): (i) unsatisfying definitions; (ii)
confusion between a language and its writers;
(iii) projection from the mother language onto
the target language; (iv) the absence of
critical reflection on the personal motivations
of the linguist. The idea that “all comparison
reveals or hides an evaluation” (a quote from
French anti-structuralist scholar Henri
Meschonnic) is finally illustrated by quotes
from handbooks of translation, showing that
even specialists in cross-linguistic philology
use clichés about the various languages they
work with.

After a brief summary of the book, Underhill
devotes Chapter 15 (“Reformulating the
Worldview hypothesis”) to several conceptual
distinctions that should serve as a framework
for further research in the direction indicated
by Humboldt. First, the notion of “World”
should not be taken for granted, and linguists
should distinguish between the world as it is,
the world as we perceive it and the world as we
speak about it. Second, “language” itself is a
polysemic term, designating “the faculty of
human speech”, “a variety of speech or body of
words belonging to a linguistic community”, or
“diction or style of speech” (p. 129). Third,
“thought” should not be taken as a block.
Patterns of thought, Underhill claims, enable
us to explore our own thought-world and to
develop newer patterns, so that thought is in
constant evolution and is not imprisoned by the
categories provided by language. Finally,
Underhill proposes to divide the notion of
“Worldview” into a set of concepts, from the
most stable, unconscious to the most personal,
conscious level: world-perceiving,
world-conceiving, “cultural mindset” , personal
world, and perspective (p. 135). In the “Final
Word”, Underhill expresses the hope that the
study of Humboldt’s thought will make it
possible to study the variety of languages and
cultures from a more accurate, less romantic
fashion than has been the case up to now.

EVALUATION

First, it must be said that the title and the
presentation of the book by the editor are
partly misleading. This is not, at least not
primarily, an analysis of Humboldt’s theories
about language, about his comparative
enterprise or about his reflections on language
and what we would now call cognition.
Underhill’s book is to a large extent a polemic
essay directed both at mainstream academic
linguistics (formal linguistics, comparative
syntax and typology as a whole) and at what
Underhill regards to be the unsatisfying
alternative provided by allegedly “naïve”
ecolinguistics and similar approaches
exemplified by David Crystal, Anne Stamm and
Claude Hagège (the fact that Stamm is not a
linguist but an anthropologist seems to play no
role). Much in the spirit of the late,
controversial French scholar Henri Meschonnic,
Underhill argues that traditional linguistics
is narrowly focused on grammar and
misunderstands the role of meaning and
communicative intentions in language, and that
a true understanding of language must be as
usage-based and interactional as possible.
Structure is regarded as a dead form, an
abstraction at odds with the essence of
language, which is an interpersonal activity.
Due to this, language is strongly culture-bound
and is at the same time the instrument for the
development of culture, including the
conceptualization of the outside world. This is
the point where Humboldt becomes relevant for
Underhill (and Meschonnic before him):
Humboldt, so Underhill claims, has
conceptualized this mutual dependency of
language, culture and collective cognition in a
much more relevant and fine-grained way than
all “ecolinguists” and representatives of the
Sapir-Whorf-hypothesis, including Whorf
himself. In this respect, Humboldt’s role here
is strictly instrumental and subordinated to
the author’s polemic aim. I must say that I
expected something else due to the title and
the presentation of the book, which are much
more focused on Humboldt’s life and works.
Those who do not know of Humboldt or expect a
comprehensive introduction to his work should
probably turn to another book, e.g. Michael
Forster’s recent essays on German philosophy of
language at that time (Forster 2010). Besides,
this strange editorial choice also undermines
the overall impression of coherence of the
essay. This is a shame, because in itself,
Underhill’s work is perfectly coherent and
another title such as “From Humboldt to Whorf”
and a more accurate presentation by the editor
would have been perfectly sufficient to show
it.

Turning to the historical reconstruction of
Humboldt’s thought by Underhill, one must say
that it is partly flawed by missing
explanations on the intellectual context in
which he worked. I will not focus upon the very
few factual mistakes; much more problematic is
the author’s interpretation of Kant’s “Critique
of Pure Reason” (Kant 1974). There is no
scholarly consensus about how direct and how
decisive Kant’s influence on Humboldt was, but
if Underhill believes that it is not possible
to understand Humboldt without mentioning Kant,
then he should have done so more thoroughly.
The summary of the “Critique of Pure Reason”
(which is never named as such), delivered on
pp. 67-68, does not correspond to the reality
of Kantian criticism, but much more to later
forms of post-Kantian “Subjective Idealism”,
which is also an important source for
Humboldt’s thought, but should not be
assimilated to Kant’s own work. Further,
Underhill never mentions the fact that language
does not play any explicit role in the
“Critique of Pure Reason”, nor does he pay
attention to Kant’s works on culture and
historical anthropology, either. This is the
most unsatisfying aspect of Underhill’s
historical reconstruction: many aspects
correctly identified in Humboldt’s theories,
such as the role of Bildung or the defense of
cultural diversity as an admirable feature of
Humankind, can already be found in very similar
terms in some of Kant’s texts on the teleology
of historical thought (Kant 1977). For Kant,
history is made by the actions of individuals,
who might pursue egoistic aims but still work
in the interest of the species, because they
move Humanity forward and make real and
effective the potentialities of our species.
This historical realization of all virtual
competences of Humanity by individuals is what
Kant calls Bildung, and the diversity of
languages, religions and cultures in the world
is the sign of that and at the same time the
proof of Humankind’s infinite richness and
potentiality. The link between this cultural
anthropology and Humboldt’s project is evident,
yet it is left unaddressed by Underhill.
Another problem, this time directly related to
Humboldt, is the idea that Humboldt’s
“Sprachbau”, the structure of language, should
be understood as a dynamic term, as “the
construction of language” and not as
“structure” in the present sense (p. 63). Yet,
in some essays that he wrote directly in
French, Humboldt himself translated “Bau” into
“structure” or “framework” (French:
‘charpente’). This suggests that for Humboldt,
the dynamic nature of language was compatible
with the relevance of static grammatical
patterns, a point that Underhill is tacitly
denying throughout the whole book.

Let us now turn to what I regard as the true
topic of the book, namely the polemic on
language and culture. At the first level,
linguists might be rebuked by the somewhat
aggressive tone of Underhill when he criticizes
modern linguistics as a sort of academic
formalism ignorant of meaning, life and
individuality (especially in Chapters 11 and
12). Apart from Boas, Sapir, Whorf and Lakoff,
the reader might get the impression that modern
linguistics is the superficial comparison of
grammatical structures in languages spoken by
people to which linguists pay no attention. In
spite of this, linguists interested in cultural
anthropology, cognitive metaphor theories and
usage-based linguistics might find some
interest in Underhill’s original attempt.
Furthermore, some interesting comparisons are
drawn between linguistics and related fields
such as translation theory or stylistics. But
the most interesting part of the book is
certainly the last chapter, where Underhill
proposes some definitions for the concepts at
stake. It is of course regrettable that those
definitions come up so late and that the author
concludes the book with a dismissal of “simple
classifications” precisely after proposing a
nomenclature of concepts. The definitions
proposed by Underhill are interesting and it
would have been very stimulating to confront
them with clear examples. The only long
illustration provided after one of those
definitions is Victor Klemperer’s (1957)
description of Nazi language as an illustration
of “Weltanschauung”, but the fact that the very
concept of “Weltanschauung” itself is one of
the words studied by Klemperer makes things
more complicated, and Underhill finally leaves
the reader with the impression that he has not
treated this example as convincingly as he
could have done. It could have been the role of
the author not to leave us with this “simple
classification”, but to show us how those
concepts could be implemented. Instead of that,
Chapter 15 is a sort of register of conceptual
tools that we are left free to use or to
neglect. Some of those distinctions, for
instance the fine-grained hierarchy of
“worldview” layers, sound very promising.
Unfortunately, this promise is delivered only a
few pages before the end of the essay, and is
doomed to stay unfulfilled, at least in this
book. In this sense, one hopes that Underhill
will write a further volume that will confirm
the high expectations raised by this very
demanding and very critical study.

Pierre-Yves Modicom holds an M.A. in German
linguistics from U. Paris Sorbonne and studied
German language and literature and philosophy
of science at the Ecole Normale Superieure,
Paris. He is currently a PhD candidate in
German linguistics at U. Paris Sorbonne.

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